Or do I have to persuade them to install an app again? And if so, how often will these manual migrations happen in future?

https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.celluloid_player....

https://flathub.org/apps/org.nickvision.tubeconverter

The packaging (tin versus squeezy bottle) isn't changing — they already sell both.

Only the labels are changing, and they're keeping the tin (specifically) unchanged: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68347249

Yes, this is the problem. The article suggests: try to fix it.

> How is Liberapay funded? Are there fees?

> Liberapay does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by the donations to its own account. However there are payment processing fees.

https://liberapay.com/about/faq

And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected.

Liberapay's model seems much more sustainable - donations only, no rewards; Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because they actually believe their system works.

Well, there's the problem: large-scale and social are incompatible. Humans evolved to be sociable with maybe a few hundred people.

No-one has ever made a good restaurant by inventing a system to deliver millions of calories per second to each diner.

This is the key.

If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon). If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've probably got some.

But if you don't — and this going to sound harsh about a labour of love — then evidently other people aren't (yet!) willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a hobby/part-time/side-project.

But for the thing to continue existing, someone (maybe you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google certainly doesn't. Google doesn't know anything about the unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny from other websites.

If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been keeping it on life support since… whatever your previous strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful to them any more.

If an app has been removed from the “Play Store”, that means it's been removed from the repo, and a different front-end to that repo won't include it.

This morning at work when I opened Firefox, instead of a blank tab it showed a popup advert saying “New device in your future?”. I found this string on bugzilla.mozilla.org, and apparently it's supposed to be an advert for setting up a Mozilla Account.

This is too stressful. I need a tool I don't have to second-guess all the time.

I've used Firefox for 20 years. I wish it would go back to behaving like a not-for-profit I can trust.

(Also, if anyone from Fedora is listening, please consider whether having this sort of user experience in an app installed by default harms your reputation more or less than GNOME Web would.)

I'd like for there to be a well-stocked Flatpak repo with policies like F-Droid's: they insist on rebuilding everything themselves, and they enthusiastically label potential anti-features. But that doesn't have to be Flathub, because using several Flatpak repos at once is easy. (This is really my only objection to Snap.)

Come to think of it, what I'm describing is a traditional Linux distro, so maybe Fedora and PureOS's existing Flatpak repos already fit the bill.

This is why we, tech nerds who understand the problem, must resist monopolies: object to using such APIs. Chrome wouldn't be in quite this position if, instead of embracing the monopolist, more techies had warned their non-techy friends and family away from it, like they did with IE.